If ever there were two schizophrenic snow seasons in Steamboat, it was the back-to-back winters of 2010-11 and 2011-12. While both entered the record books, they did so for markedly different reasons — the former for its bounty and the latter for its bleakness.

The 2010-11 season was unprecedented — including a 433-inch ski season, a 90-inch record November and a May snow stake on Buff Pass registering 732 percent of average, the deepest snowpack in Colorado history. Someone even put a snorkel on the Buddy Werner statue atop Mount Werner. Fast forward a year, and it was the exact opposite. Despite a 24-hour midmountain record 27 inches on Presidents Day, the same snow stake on Buff Pass clocked in at just 7 percent of average in May, and the resort tallied just 228 inches.

“The past two years couldn’t have been more different,” says Art Judson, a former avalanche forecaster and climatological observer for the National Weather Service.

So what does all of this spell for this year? Who knows. While old-timers might watch this year’s skunk cabbage, woolly bear caterpillar’s stripes, hay crop harvest, blackbird migration and beaver dam height, here’s our prediction: It won’t be any worse than last year or any better than the year before.

“The good news is we’ve never had two record low years in a row,” Judson says.